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Falls are the leading cause of home deaths. Poisoning is the second leading cause of home deaths, right ahead of fires and drowning. Many people take the safety of their food for granted. We go to the grocery store and buy our nummies. We cook them and eat. All is good.

In a disaster, without adequate hygiene and food preparation and storage, many could suffer from food poisoning. Many preppers preserve, can, or process their own foods. Given this, it behooves us to understand a bit about food poisoning. We should have some idea of how to recognize if a person might have food poisoning. We should know how to treat it. Most importantly, we should learn about how to prevent it.

The National Institute of Health has some good basic information about food poisoning.

Culinaryarts.about.com has a nice write up about the symptoms of food poisoning.

The FDA has a 265 page pdf called “The Bad Bug Book” or ” Foodborne Pathogenic Microorganisms and Natural Toxins Handbook” I guess one title is aimed at lay people like us.

This pdf is a pretty intense resource: “Each chapter in this book is about a pathogen – a bacterium, virus, or parasite – or a natural toxin that can contaminate food and cause illness” I’d read the little blue boxes.

To protect small children from ingesting something they shouldn’t, we should have chemicals locked up or out of reach. Choking is another significant cause of household deaths. New parents should learn about choking and how small objects must be kept away from babies.

Ingesting poison is only one path to poisoning. Inhalation of poison is another. Preppers should know about carbon monoxide poisoning. In today’s modern homes, which don’t have as much air exchange as older homes, things inside your home could make you sick. This is a huge field of environmental health called Sick House Syndrome or Sick Building Syndrome.

Whenever you bring building materials into your home, ask yourself: Are these good materials to have inside the home? Will they out gas chemicals? Who can forget the smelly Chinese drywall scandal?

If you learn just a little bit about food poisoning, keep hazardous chemicals out of the reach of small children, and know just a bit about home air issues, you and your family should be safe from most poisonings—A midget Ninja with a poison dart might still get you.

Hantavirus is extremely rare, but it’s one of the few specific threats I mention in the book because many nations have biological weapons departments trying to make this pass from human to human. If a modified version of it ever gets out, it could be problematic, kind of like the movie Contagion starring Matt Damon, which I just saw a few days ago.

Some preppers prep for swine flu or bird flu, but I bet if there is a future plague, it will be Hantavirus based. It’s reasonable that during dry conditions and drought this virus could be particularly bad, because more deadly mouse poop becomes dried up and airborne.

People filming the hit TV show Hoarders found Hantavirus in Texas. The dust inside is particularly deadly, because outside UV light from the sun effectively kills the virus.

If you enjoy bodyweight exercises and are looking for a challenge, visit beastskills.com which has some great articles about progressively building up to do some pretty intense exercises, like the one-handed pushup.